Oct/01
A Bit of Pixie Dust

It's been Macromedia's 'Cool Site of the Day,' a finalist at FlashForward 2001 in San Francisco, and now our Switch Interactive division's www.brokensaints.com project (co-produced with writer/director Brooke Burgess) has won a coveted Pixie Award in Los Angeles (September 22, 2001) for "Best Web Design Incorporating Motion."

What are the Pixies? Well, the easiest way to describe them is to say that feature films have the Oscars; music has the Grammies; TV has the Emmies; theatre has the Tonys; Web sites have the Webbies; and now online motion pixures have the Pixies (from the word 'pixel' of course.) This year, 375 entries from around the world were judged by an independent panel of industry leaders and winners were awarded in 13 categories. Broken Saints was up for two awards and was cited as "a stunning example of multi-layered Flash animation magic." To find out more about the Pixies go to: www.pixieawards.org

We couldn't be more pleased. The idea behind establishing Switch Interactive was that it would not only provide Web development services to Fleming Design's corporate clients, but would also make a mark in the area of 'digital storytelling' by incubating innovative ideas for presentation on the Web. Broken Saints, the brainchild of Vancouver-based writer Brooke Burgess, came to the company by way of introduction through one of Switch's first employees, Flash innovator Ian Kirby. An idea became reality and over Year 2000, six episodes and a riveting Web site were created by Brooke, Ian, and another Switch employee, Andrew West, the talent behind the memorable illustrative style of Broken Saints. In May 2001, the Broken Saints team took the project out of the Switch studios in order to focus exclusively on completing the next 18 episodes of the 24-part online graphic novel. And Switch looks forward to its next co-operative project, moving from the Japanese manga-inspired world of Broken Saints to a photographic medium, combining words, pictures, and motion.

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